On Sept. 4, 1987, Roop Kanwar, chisel-faced, doe-eyed, and in the bloom of her life at 18, burnt alive on the funeral pyre of her husband of eight months, Maal Singh, in Diorala village of Rajasthan. Not a single villager of the Rajput enclave saw anything out of ordinary in the ebullient teen’s “voluntary” self-immolation. Kanwar is still worshipped as Sati by village elders. On the other hand, the police and some women rights groups found it “impossible” that a beautiful, educated girl could volunteer for such a gruesome end.

An incident like this is indeed improbable. So was 9/11. The US government summarily dismissed credible CIA intelligence that terroists were plotting to bring down important US landmarks with the help of commercial airliners. The logic went: It was simply “impossible”. Improbable, yes. Pas impossible.

Before the start of scientific exploration of outer space, life outside Earth was thought well nigh impossible. The latest scientific estimate puts the number of ‘visible’ (just visible) stars in the universe at 70 sextillion (70 million million million; over 10 times the number of grains of sand in all beaches of the world). In other words, the likelihood of extraterrestrial life in the cosmos of such proportions is many times more as compared to the risk of your contracting third-degree cancer, AIDS, TB and Ebola, all at the same time.

It was equally improbable that an eccentric German Jew could upturn our notion of the physical world, virtually overnight, with the theory of relatively. That Craig Venter would synthesise part of bacterial genome in a Petri dish.

And who would have thought Jana Andolan II could garner such a huge support? (A CNN journo described the sight of the ocean of people on the streets as unlike anything he had seen in his hallowed career.) Or that a Maoist might in a not too distant future occupy the country’s highest post?

Here’s a non-starter. Nepal will one day launch her own satellites. Well...I learn Kathmandu is home to an astronomical society that carries out painstaking studies on outer space.

Vetted some of their releases. The sky-gazers are on the money. Nagarkot-Neptune, anyone?